“So, I have a question,” Dean said. My stomach knotted up.
“Do I have to answer it?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said. I stared up at the Scorpion constellation’s gleaming frame. Was there some way I could sting myself with its tail? Was there some way I could ascend to the heavens and get out of this thing where I screwed up my life on Earth over and over again?
“What is your favorite song?” Dean asked.
Oh. My whole body sighed with relief. I laughed, probably too hard. “Oh, crap—that is a really hard question.”
“You have to answer.” He was smiling, but he didn’t seem all there somehow. This was all filler so he could slip away unnoticed. Still, if we were going to make small talk and pretend nothing had happened, this was probably the best small talk there was.
“Well. Okay. Actually, my favorite song when I was six was ‘I Will Survive.’”
“Already demonstrated to be of timeless value,” he said. “Go on.”
“The first record I bought with my allowance was Elvis Costello, My Aim Is True.”
“Marked improvement in your taste.”
“I’m really into Velvet Underground & Nico right now,” I said. “‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’”
“Awesome.”
“Um, I love X—‘Fourth of July.’”
“A great song.”
“I’m not saying it’s my favorite, just that I really like it. Maybe this should just be a list of great songs. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’? Queen? Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’? But then there’s Marvin Gaye—anything on What’s Going On. Anything on Bob Dylan’s Desire. I feel the need to include a Joni Mitchell song here. ‘Blue’? Who has a favorite song? How is that possible? My mind is actually exploding right now.”
“It was a trick question,” he said. “It’s not possible.”
“So not fair,” I said.
“You guys are total music nerds,” Rosie called groggily from the back. “I like Bob Seger.”
Dean and I both groaned. “Rosie—watch out. You’re going back on my shit list.”
“Bon Jovi? Whitney Houston. Madonna?”
“Great-looking, not actual good music,” Dean said.
“Kenny G?”
I put my hands up. “Stop it, you’re hurting my ears!”
“Cyndi Lauper?”
Dean shook his head, but I said, “I can give you that one.”
“Prince?”
“Is that a real question?” I asked her. “Do you dare to suggest that someone doesn’t like Prince?”
“Michael Jackson?”
“Everyone in the entire world likes Michael Jackson,” I said. I took the tape out from the glove compartment, put it in, and turned the volume way up.
“The Girl Is Mine” blasted from the speakers.
“You do realize this is the worst song on the album, right?” asked Dean. But Rosie sang it anyway, loud and off-key, and I loved her.
When Rosie was asleep in the back again, and the windows were down, the soft night sky on our arms, Dean cleared his throat. “Listen …”
I didn’t want him to finish. He was going to pre-break up with me. Or say he just wanted to be friends. Or say that he couldn’t hang out anymore because he didn’t want to get attacked with a shoe.
“No, you don’t have to—”
“No, listen, okay? Just listen.” He checked in the rearview mirror to make sure Rosie was still asleep. “Listen—it’s okay. What happened back there. I totally get it. It’s freaky, but I get it. Don’t think … you know … don’t think that I won’t …”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“But, I do have a question,” he said. “A real question.”
“Well,” I said. “You’re in luck.”
I told him everything.
Pablo the arborist’s daughter wasn’t at their country house, and I stayed in her room and I did as any fourteen-year-old girl would do, or so I thought—as my friends and I did whenever we were babysitting: I rifled through her things. Then, when my dad and Pablo went out and got stoned on the deck—as if I didn’t know what they were doing—I went through Pablo’s wife’s and daughter’s things, and I compiled a stash: an opal and diamond ring, a silver bracelet with carvings of moons and stars (my favorite), an owl pin with tiny rubies. I even took the little framed greeting cards off the wall in the daughter’s room and put them in my purple duffel bag with the red handles: one picture of a peace dove, the delicate olive branch balanced in its beak, the other a photograph of a sculpture of two stone bodies wrapped around each other. I was so psyched. I barely had any jewelry, and I loved those pictures.
My dad said I wanted to get caught. He claimed I left my notebook open on the kitchen table to the page where I described the loot in detail—bragged, he said, about the haul. My mom couldn’t call up that old-fashioned defense of hers: She’s just a kid, Paul, leave her alone. She couldn’t say anything.
Then it was all four of us in the kitchen, Rosie, just turned ten, and my dad and my mom. He put me in a chair and interrogated me while my mom sat empty-eyed in the corner and Rosie was just sitting there looking astonished and genuinely frightened on my behalf.
You’re a thief, he kept saying. I tried to run out of the kitchen, but my dad blocked the door and then it just happened. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter, and I held it against Rosie’s throat, and I said, Let me out of here, or I’ll kill her.
The blow from the backside of my father’s hand was sudden and strong, and then I was on the ground, my father standing over my crumpled body with his hand pointed at me like a gun, and he said, Don’t you dare touch my daughter. And the three of them left and locked the door, and I just lay there on that cold and dirty tile screaming and sobbing.
I think I fell asleep. Eventually I heard the click of the door unlocking. I stood up and brushed off my dirty clothes, a colorful tie-dye T-shirt and a jean skirt. I walked out of the kitchen and passed my father, his eyes red from crying or pot I didn’t know and didn’t care, out of the front door and over to Soo’s, and I didn’t come home for a week.
Soo’s mom didn’t mind. She’d always liked me better than she liked her own kid—Soo, you slob, pick up your room, to Soo, and Carrie, honey, how you doing? Come over and tell me what’s new, to me. My mom and dad didn’t even call.
And then one day my dad appeared in front of Soo’s house in our dented crap-brown Buick, and I came out and got in and he started the car and we didn’t talk until I saw that we weren’t headed home, when I said, Where are we going? He didn’t look at me. He just said, I’m taking you to a shrink.
I told Dean now what I told the therapist then: the full length of my confession. All the stealing from babysitting gigs and all the gross shit I’d already done with boys and all the cigarettes and pot and drinking I’d already starting doing with Greta and Soo and how I’d put myself in all manner of unseemly situations and how many times I just could not calm down. I unleashed it all.
“I think I thought that some part of me was going to be saved when I told her all that stuff,” I said to Dean. “That I would have a real-life ally.”
“I get it,” he said, his lips still turned down.
“So, then the therapist decided to be the worst human being in the world and told my mom and dad, and they told all the people I babysat for, and I lost all my jobs, and everyone knew, everywhere I went, and then I didn’t feel like being alive anymore, and I said so, so they locked me up in the hospital for a week and pumped me full of drugs, and when I got out, each family that I babysat for came to our house and asked me what I’d stolen and if I’d taken drugs or smoked cigarettes around their kids. And I hadn’t, but they seemed like they didn’t believe me.
“After that I was pretty much banned from babysitting, and the only job I could get was as cashier at my dad’s friend’s clothing store. So, that was my summer
job last year, but this year I got canned and my father sent me to boot camp. Before that, I was mostly sitting around, making a mix tape for my funeral.”
Finally, I was done. I exhaled. Dean knew everything, and after that, I’d never see him again and that was fine because nothing was ever going to happen between us anyway. “Everything with my dad and pretty much every other human in this town has just gotten worse and worse.”
Dean shifted gears again as we neared the exit. Freckles even on his fingers. I loved freckles so much.
“That’s probably the name of our album,” he said. “Mix Tape for My Funeral.”
“Something’s wrong with me,” I whispered, trying so hard not to cry. “I’m some kind of crazy.”
He was silent for a minute, and in that time, the whole world was opening and closing, full of possibility and defeat. “Yeah, something’s wrong with me, too,” he said finally. “You know what’s wrong with me?”
“What?” I screwed up the courage to look at him.
“I like crazy chicks.”
I sort of laugh-cried and accidentally spit on myself and said, “Oh, crap,” and waved my hand in front of my face as if trying to erase the spitting moment and then I was embarrassed about that, too, and I put my hands over my ears and then on my legs—I just couldn’t stop moving them.
“Here,” Dean said, grabbing my left hand and putting it on his thigh, the rough jeans, the knee bone beneath it. And he put his hand over it and kept it there. But his mouth was set in a dangerous shape. Maybe that was the look he got when he was retreating, even as he sat there next to me.
Dean pulled up in front of our house. Rosie got out and stood on the porch, waiting for me to follow her.
“Do you want me to go in with you?” he asked, but I got the feeling he didn’t want to. I stayed in the front seat, not wanting to leave the perfect retreat of his car.
“No,” I said finally, popping the door open. “Listen, if I don’t come out alive—”
“Carrie—” He grabbed my wrist. I waited, still, terrified, eager, everything all at once. He leaned into me, his face so close to mine.
“Yeah?”
He looked at me for what felt like a long time. And then he said, “Nothing.”
That summed it up. Nothing. I handed him back his rugby shirt. I was calm now, but the whole chemical compound seemed to have shifted between us. The visit with my mother already seemed to have happened days, weeks ago. I may never have gotten my mother back, and I may never have gotten Dean, but at least I had my telescope.
Chapter 14
“Where have you two been?” my father asked. Did he ever leave that chair anymore? He looked as haggard as my mom, though he didn’t sound angry—maybe because Rosie was gone too, he was worried instead of pissed.
“We went to see Mom,” Rosie said, as if it were an everyday occurrence. Sometimes I liked Rosie. Now was one of those times. She headed toward the stairs with the stand, while I held the heavy metal body of the telescope in my arms. “We took back Carrie’s telescope.”
All he could muster was “I see that.” He stood up and began to walk toward me and I instinctively moved back, toward the stairs.
“Before you ground me, don’t bother,” I said. “I’m getting my things. I’m leaving.” Weirdly, I didn’t sound mad, either. It seemed like we had just come to the end of the line. I’d move into Soo’s after she left for school in three weeks, then come back for my telescope. Or I’d hide in Mrs. Richmond’s basement. Or I’d follow Dean back to Oregon, where someday, after four thousand hours of driving around in his car, we’d kiss. “You don’t need to worry about me anymore.”
I started up the stairs with parts of my telescope tucked under my arm, heading toward my room. Or at least I tried to, but it was all so heavy and my back still hurt and my fingernail was still bruised and my already-healed hands still had that tender layer of new pink skin. Rosie had already ascended and passed out on her bed, but I was stuck down there at the bottom of the stairs, the victim of gravity.
“Don’t,” my father said. “Please.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t leave.”
“Why?” I said from the third stair. “Don’t you want to get rid of me?”
My father furrowed his brows and opened his mouth, somehow stunned at my question. “Get rid of you? Is that what you think I want?”
I nodded.
“No, no. Carrie. I love you, and I want you to be okay, and so far you’re not.”
“I am okay,” I whispered. “I am.”
“I love you,” my dad said again, and I hated him for saying it, because his hating me had been the fuel that kept me running. “I already lost one daughter. I can’t bear to lose another.”
It was too much for me to hear. I’d always figured that his stinging rejection came from his sense that, if it weren’t for me fleeing and Ginny racing after me, he’d still have his pride and joy, her shiny hair and beautiful eyes, her weird genius for remembering the half-lives of every element on the periodic table even though she got C’s in chemistry by the very end. But maybe not. Maybe he really didn’t know.
I felt like I needed to flee. I needed to be alone in my room with the telescope, me and my old metal friend, and I tried to stand and haul it up, haul it away from my father and his terrible sadness and love, but it was just too heavy. It was all just too heavy.
“Can I help you with that?” he asked me, gesturing toward my telescope.
“Um. I don’t know. What are you going to do with it?”
He said, “I’m going to set it up so we can look for the comet.”
And that is how, at the end of the longest night I’d ever had that didn’t involve tremendous amounts of alcohol and drugs, I came to be sitting on Ginny’s old carpet with my father, who, for almost two years now, had been my biggest nemesis. Before Ginny died, Soo had decorated the room in a kind of Hollywood glamour look: coral colored walls and black and white bedding and a fluffy white rug, Christmas lights strung around the window; all of it was perfectly preserved. Her room had windows on three sides and skylights. It had always been the best for stargazing, but none of us ever went in it.
“I need to tell you what happened that night,” he said.
“I don’t know if you do.”
But he pressed on. “Ginger heard us fighting, your mom and I. You must have heard us too.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t remember anything else about that night.”
“I mean in general. You must have heard us fighting.”
I shook my head, turning the handle of the screwdriver in my fingers. “I thought we were, you know, a happy family. We weren’t?”
“Your mom and I weren’t happy, no.”
I digested this information, tried to fit this piece into the puzzle of our family history.
“What about all those hiking trips to the Catskills? All those trips into the city to the planetarium? You guys weren’t happy?”
He put the smaller parts of the telescope in a line on the rug. “Of course we had happy times. Of course. It just kind of … it just kind of went sour, past its expiration date.”
“Your marriage is not food, Dad.”
“No, I know. I just wasn’t sure we could resurrect it.”
“What does this have to do with Ginny?”
“She heard us that night,” he said, his voice catching. “She heard us fighting. It was a bad fight.”
“What does that mean—a bad fight?”
“It means … it means … It’s hard for me to say.”
“Just say it.” I said. “Get it over with.”
He couldn’t look at me. Instead he screwed the alt-azimuth mount to the base of the lens. “You have to ask your mother,” he said. “She has to be the one to tell you.”
“This is the world’s most unsatisfying conversation,” I said, though in some ways, I was relieved. If it was that awful, maybe I didn’t want to know.
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“We had this terrible fight, and Ginger walked right into the middle of it, and she ran out of the house and took the keys to the car so we couldn’t even go after her. That’s why Pablo had to drive us to the police station.”
I shook my head at this. “You think that’s why she died? You think that’s why she drove your car seventy-five miles an hour down the Avenue of the Pines and crashed into a tree?”
“I think that had something to do with it, yes,” my father said quietly. “Maybe not the fight. Maybe it was because we pretended that we didn’t know what Ginny would do after she got in that car.”
He was absolving me in that moment—offering me the chance to let myself off the hook, or at least to take my secret with me to the grave. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t let him walk around thinking it was him when it was me. He had his hands in his lap now, and he was staring at them, his right thumb and index finger stroking the left ring finger, still optimistically encircled in a gold band.
“You didn’t know,” I said. “But I did.”
His hands stopped. He looked up.
“I was there,” I said, and I was whispering, but I had never said this before to anyone anywhere—not the therapist and not Dean and not Soo. No one.
Now I told my father about sneaking out and peeking in the window of the observatory and seeing her, bending her head over that rolled-up bill, snorting and drinking and tipping her head back and laughing with her mouth wide open, but maybe crying too. She was a mess, a real live mess.
“I saw Ginny doing that, and I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was bad,” I told him. “And right then Ginny looked up and saw me and saw that I’d seen her, and she called out my name, but I just hid in the woods until she got in the car, and then I got on my bike and rode away. I rode home. She came after me, but I just came home and went to sleep. I didn’t stop her. And then—” All emotion lifted out of my body, as if it had been carried away by a helium balloon. “She died.”
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